flyonthewall2983 wrote:Since finding out that was on Fox, I've wondered what would have happened if Twin Peaks was with them instead of ABC, if Lynch would have run into the same problems he did at such an established network.

Not to go on a detour, but the interesting thing about ABC and their treatment of the 1990-91 Twin Peaks is that they were actually, at least especially in the beginning, extraordinarily kind to Lynch and Frost and indeed there was some sort of clause in both men's contracts, some understanding, that amounted to ABC not being able to tell them what to do, creatively. So all the flaws there are the result of mostly decisions made by the show-runners/writers themselves. Of course this is mostly down to Peyton & Engels in mid-late S2, when the show took a nosedive and Lynch and Frost were barely there, but Frost and even Lynch as well provided some of the most hated moments or storylines - e.g. Frost was fascinated by Ken Burns's celebrated Civil War doc, which was airing during production, and as a result he spearheaded the whole idea of having Ben Horne go insane and then try to re-enact the Civil War on behalf of the south. And the infamous Josie drawer-pull thing was apparently purely Lynch's idea. Personally I strongly dislike the General Horne stuff, which may be my least favorite major plotline of that mid-late S2 stretch, or maybe tied with Little Nicky and Lana Milford's stories. But I actually really like the Josie thing, an idea so strange it works and works because of and not in spite of those dated SFX. (Though the re-appearances of BOB and especially the Man From Another Place just beforehand are very contrived and devoid of those characters's earlier intensity).

There's a few other such examples but I forget at the moment. But anyway, my point is that ABC mostly harmed the show by switching up its time-slot so ridiculously often, starting with putting it on on Saturdays at the start of S2. I mean, really? That was a huge mistake, but otherwise the flaws and compromises of the original series are either simply due to bad decisions from Frost, Peyton, Engels or Lynch, or just the format of network TV not allowing for something more extreme... Then again, what could be more "extreme" and disturbing than the climactic sequence of Lynch's Episode 14 when the killer is revealed? Ultimately, I do prefer the way Twin Peaks functioned as a network television series over whatever it was doing exactly over those 18 hours as a Prestige, Important, Dark, Mature SHOWTIME drama. It's like how Mad Men was, I suspect, much better on AMC than it would have been on HBO.

And so the ultimate question when it comes to ABC vs. Lynch & Frost is, who really pulled the trigger and made that decision that the killer MUST be revealed, and revealed soon? The answer is that ABC did nothing in the way of this except relating pressure, which was immense from viewers - many if not most who'd tuned out well before that 7th episode of S2, or 14th overall, when the mystery is solved. Indeed, just the S1 finale not answering WKLP? was a huge deal, ending on a bunch of cliffhangers was seen as contemptuous of the audience. It's crazy how entitled people were in thinking they HAD to know the answer, to say nothing of the stupid, puzzle-box, left-brained approach to art that such an impatient focus on that one question and its answer naturally suggests.

Really, it seems if anything it was Frost who pressured Lynch into revealing the killer when he did - and Lynch didn't want to reveal that sucker EVER. For Lynch the show was finished as soon as he did. For Frost, it'd mean it had only just got started, and could then swerve into some other zany or mysterious happenings with the townsfolk and maybe focus on a new unifying mystery. In short, for Lynch, Twin Peaks was (and has remained) all about Laura Palmer and Agent Cooper; for Frost, Twin Peaks was always about the town and its various residents, with the Laura hook simply a way of pulling us into that locale. (This is part of why S3 frustrates me - though we get plenty of Coop, Laura is totally given short shrift, as are Sarah and Leland. The eerie "Between Two Worlds" feature that was on the Entire Mystery set - two interviews with all three Palmers, one in-character and one not - seems to me to have been more satisfying on that front than almost all of S3, which only rushed back to Laura at the very end once it'd spent a dozen hours dawdling around like Dougie himself).

Whatever the cause, though, Lynch relented and directed that powerhouse episode with BOB and

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Leland killing Maddie in the most horrific way possible, in a way the censorship of network TV making it 100x more brutal or maybe it didn't matter either way and it was just the cinematic tools that Lynch applies to depicting it that continue to haunt and disturb the mind

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Those different respective focuses on what the show is all about accounts for the divergent tone and style, a year later, of Lynch's FWWM, whose genuine love of its protagonist in Laura Palmer is one of its countless shining assets - it's a real humanist piece of work. Then you have Frost who to this day is more involved in conspiracy lore and history and FBI investigations and the supernatural and sci-fi type mumbo jumbo. The heady brew that his produced with S3 was at times a silly mess overloaded with Frostian exposition, delivered by Lynch ciphers with long pauses a'plenty between words.

But I don't think ABC really did much beyond the time-slot tomfoolery, despite common opinion. They could suggest or pressure things but I think ultimately revealing the killer 14 or 15 episodes into the series was all Mark and David's decision.

“‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ was a question that we never really wanted to answer,” Lynch explained earlier this year. “That was the goose that laid these golden eggs. And at a certain point, we were told to wrap that up, and it never really got back going after that.”

. Lynch would seem to claim otherwise in terms of the network and Lauras killer. That said, he's also all over season 2, especially acting, so he couldnt have been too upset to turn down the money. Season 2 is a shambles, but like you mentioned, one can appreciate it as a warts and all weirdo mainstream show. This was competing not with Jim Jarmusch, but like Dallas or whatever.

Yeah, that is confusing - I do wonder if they'll turn out to be these Missing Pieces-style chunks, like mini-episodes perhaps covering only one plot thread or character which didn't make it into the final cut. Then again I feel like I read somewhere that literally about everything Lynch shot DID make it in the 18 hours we saw - which seems very hard to believe!

Certainly some or all of those could be BTS things but I'm doubtful considering Lynch usually doesn't do that at all - like, ever - and this bit of speculation by WTTP from the link above just seems specious at best:"We know a lot of interviews and behind-the-scenes footage were shot during production, so perhaps quotes from cast and crew serve as titles for BTS documentaries? “Martin,” for instance, could refer to set decorator Florencia Martin or driver Martin Tajra."

Zot!, I wouldn't say Lynch is the most reliable narrator, so to speak, concerning network interference. there may have been some light pressure, from both ABC and Frost, and my guess is that Lynch above all regrets caving.

"oh yeah," just wanted to say how much I appreciated your post. I think your observations of the ways that working to fit their ambitions for Twin Peaks into the strictures of 1990s network TV actually benefited the show in many respects, and the comparatively unbridled freedom Lynch and Frost seemed to have had with S3 led to mixed results.

as for the infamous "powerhouse episode" you mention, I have a story about that. I was 12–13 when the show aired, so my best friend and I were probably two of its youngest dedicated viewers. we watched it together in the TV room in the attic of her parents' house. They were pretty oblivious to whatever we were up to, but the evening of the show in question, her mom decided to visit us (to bring some milk and cookies!) and stepped in just at the climactic moment when

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BOB/Leland tortures and kills Maddie.

she howled "What are you watching?!?!" and from then on took an unfortunately keener interest in her daughter's TV viewing habits.

whaleallright wrote:Zot!, I wouldn't say Lynch is the most reliable narrator, so to speak, concerning network interference. there may have been some light pressure, from both ABC and Frost, and my guess is that Lynch above all regrets caving.

"oh yeah," just wanted to say how much I appreciated your post. I think your observations of the ways that working to fit their ambitions for Twin Peaks into the strictures of 1990s network TV actually benefited the show in many respects, and the comparatively unbridled freedom Lynch and Frost seemed to have had with S3 led to mixed results.

as for the infamous "powerhouse episode" you mention, I have a story about that. I was 12–13 when the show aired, so my best friend and I were probably two of its youngest dedicated viewers. we watched it together in the TV room in the attic of her parents' house. They were pretty oblivious to whatever we were up to, but the evening of the show in question, her mom decided to visit us (to bring some milk and cookies!) and stepped in just at the climactic moment when

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BOB/Leland tortures and kills Maddie.

she howled "What are you watching?!?!" and from then on took an unfortunately keener interest in her daughter's TV viewing habits.

Thanks whale - I always learn something or get something to chew on from your posts as well, so cheers. And yeah, absolutely - it's odd, but that 2017 premium-cable kind of freedom didn't do many favors to S3. Lynch unleashed isn't necessarily a good thing when his ideas and approach have, I think, declined steadily over the past 15-20 years.

So in retrospect, the ABC form of the show being so much more successful to my eyes I think is largely due less to something about being an ABC series in 1990 than to Lynch's style at the time, and how preferable I find that style to what he's been doing since Mulholland. I concur with J. Hoberman's assessment of Inland Empire a decade ago now, when he said something like, digital has opened Lynch's mental floodgates and the result is a mish-mash of unfiltered and often unrelated-seeming ideas both good and bad. And S3 of Peaks absolutely had that narratively digressive feel, the feeling that we're watching a thousand different scenes that function almost by themselves, often tenuously connected to the rest and more often just simply dull or uninteresting to sit through.

Anyhow, re: Episode 14, that's funny and it's funny also just how many similar stories I've read or heard from people who were often age 10-13 and recount vivid memories of just how insanely disturbing that scene was. It still is amazing that it got past the censors, that it aired... that THAT thing fucking aired on ABC, primetime network TV, for millions of people to possibly accidentally witness whilst flipping through channels. I think there was a minor controversy in the UK after it was aired on BBC or somesuch and complaints came in about how overly graphic it was, et al.

The thing though is that it's not even a very graphic sequence! There's a punch in the face (which is truly repulsive, with the sound and all, when it happens), and then there's not much else besides the final slamming of the poor victim's head into that painting. So it's really how Lynch shoots and edits it which makes it seem so much more graphic and/or disturbing, and by god is it disturbing. I was 19 when I first ran through the series and I watched that for the first time past midnight in my room. I was more astonished, speechless, drained and not knowing what to think or say, than anything else, but sleeping certainly wasn't an enticing proposition. It's a scene that really grabs a hold of you and makes you look at the reality of violence in reality vs. on screen. It shows how phony other films and series which show violence are.

Mainly, I guess, Lynch makes the scene disturbing by how LONG and NEVERENDING it truly seems. As we pivot back and forth from strobe-lit slow-motion mauling by this animalistic force, to a more ground-zero reality that reveals the plain truth of what this kind of violence looks like. The way the killer sadistically toys with the victim by dancing and weeping and projecting Laura onto them basically, it gives the scene another dimension.

I really would put Episode 14 up there with the best of Lynch - especially the ending sequence with the murder AND the Roadhouse characters all feeling something in the air and just nonsensically (from a rational point of view) crying and crying and looking into the distance in a kind of shock. It's transcendent, especially with the Julee Cruise song. It's like Lynch said, alright I'll slaughter that goose with the golden eggs, if I'm gonna kill it I'm gonna kill it good and give this episode my all. And he did.

And one last point on this - did you know that Mary Sweeney was the editor on Ep 14? That was her first editing job with Lynch, or with anyone else. And I think it's interesting that he chose her for that episode, which otherwise just would've been cut by Jon Shaw or Toni Morgan. Sweeney and Lynch of course became partners, and were partners in film as well as life from the early 90s til around the time Inland Empire came out. So that's my other thought - that Sweeney was very, very key in shaping Lynch's work, not just via editing, but all aspects of the craft. She wrote The Straight Story, after discovering the real-life story and after initial disinterest finally getting Lynch to take on the project.

She did a spectacular job editing all those peak-Lynch-era flicks, Lost Highway and FWWM and the rest. And I suspect that she reigned in Lynch's impulse to elongate everything and digress and make pictures longer than they need to be. If you compare the absurdly digressive and messy Wild at Heart to the Sweeney-edited films I think you see the difference between Lynch unleashed and Lynch working together with a great partner who also supposedly helped shape his work to be more female-centered or at least more sensitive to women, more interested in women than men even. So while LH is basically a man's film through and through, it doesn't objectify without thought the women in it. The Madonna-whore complex of Arquette's character(s), projected by Pullman, reflects only his twisted thoughts instead of Lynch's. And then FWWM and Mulholland, of course, revolve around their female protagonists - getting into their minds not out of some male desperation to know "what women want" etc but as a genuine effort, exploring a character like Diane Selwyn's dreams and desires and guilt and loathing and the rest.

So I can only wonder what Inland Empire or S3 of Peaks for that matter might look like if Sweeney had not only edited them but still been close enough to Lynch to persuade him away from some impulses. Even just to have someone like Mary to bounce ideas off of, someone close and someone who knows what they're talking about... that's worth more than anything money can buy. And I wonder as well, then, if Lynch's separation from Sweeney caused him to naturally revert back to practicing filmmaking without that other voice, and thus creating a lot of self-indulgent material, or material that simply needs to be tightened up or even excised, etc.

Anyway, I can only speculate... but I think it's not a coincidence that the period ranging from late 1990 to 2001, from Twin Peaks episode 2x07 to Mulholland Drive, is also my favorite period of Lynch's career by far, and the period where he shined the most because he became more humbled, more sensitive, more humane and compassionate. Just recall the wild shrieking "look at me!" antics of Wild at Heart, before Sweeney had any involvement, a film content to milk most sensitive subjects for pure wacky humor or unnecessarily graphic scenes. It's got a soft spot for its two main characters, but that's not enough... because literally everyone else in the world of the film is depicted as unseemly criminals, murderers, perverts, squares, mentally ill folks with tons of Wacky stories about them, other creeps you don't want to get near, mothers from hell, black hired assassins who get beaten to a blood pulp, etc.

Then recall Fire Walk With Me, and the difference (after just 2 years) is staggering. It's the work of a director who's completely matured and put away almost all of his questionable tendencies in favor of the most moving portrait of a doomed woman, herself both sinner and saint but with emphasis on the latter not the former, because it's not like Laura was a master criminal - she just needed cocaine to fill the void in her caused by the horrendous rape and abuse and the final realization of who is actually the perpetrator and the one who created that hole. Sheryl Lee almost deserves co-writer or co-director credit for that film, so much did her performance and opinions otherwise powerfully influence the film itself. I bet Sweeney would've had those Missing Pieces stay in a closet somewhere if there wasn't already a running time restriction. That kind of restriction really helped Lynch's work - he himself said that Lost Highway having to be about 135 - 140 minutes and no longer really helped him be more disciplined in his shaping and editing of a movie.

But then Inland Empire comes along at 3 hours, and Season 3 comes along with a staggering 18 hours of content - and all I can think is, they should have stayed with the original agreement of 9 or so episodes. Because, love it or hate it, Season 3 was not a tightly edited piece of work, not as a whole I mean but also just individual scenes and the pacing... oh God, the pacing of the dialogue too often seemed like almost a parody of Lynch's silent/paused-filled conversations. Duwayne Dunham edited all that and he's an old friend and collaborator of Lynch's who did great work directing 3 episodes for the ABC incarnation back in '90 or '91. But he probably was another yes-man who accepted whatever Lynch desired.

The problem with the auteur theory or rather the auteur worship that kind of results from it, is that you sometimes get situations like Lynch's, where they NEED restrictions instead of total freedom. Blue Velvet had to be 2 hours tops, and it was. And it's a masterpiece, a film that will continue to endure. As will Fire, Lost, Straight, and Mulholland.

Can't say I see the same thing being true for Season 3, though. As the fans who shrieked the loudest from May to September about how perfect the series was and how awful anyone who critiqued it at all was, start to fade away, I think the more critical appraisals of it will come into prominence. It's a grab-bag of great stuff and not-very-great stuff and I'm still astonished that with so much freedom and opportunity and money they decided to create this unwieldy mess. Where was Sweeney when we needed her most?

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I just can't understand this hype of S3 as not just superb in every way from start to finish but also their lack of disappointment. Because I feel like the show could've gone SO MANY different directions, all of which would be more compelling than the 12 episode Dougie-limbo we got. It's perverse - bringing the original, "real" Cooper back and in full Good Coop mode, both cheery and strict, but even when more strict still always having that touch of compassion. So we get 15 minutes or whatever of the real Coop, then in the next episode Coop is just a witness, or a coach cheering Freddie on, to the awful awful awful BOB-ball "scene" (if you can call such a trivialization of the show's entire core mythos and bad-guy a scene at all instead of a bit of spitting on the Twin Peaks concept).

And then after that we have Coop going to a completely different world and different time, et al, and after that we never really see the "real" Coop again. It's fascinating and thrilling when "Richard"/Coop so expertly disarms and beats up those three lumbering cowboys at Judy's coffee shop. And it's interesting to see different elements of Coop all come out one by one, like Mr. C's coldness with the fight and gun disposal in Judy's, or the Dougie-like confused state that occurs a few times but most notably in the very final scene as he ambles in one direction with his hand tentatively outstretched - as if looking for some invisible door to open on this quiet suburban street with this evil house.

There's bits of the Original Formula Cooper in there, like his manner of speaking when Carrie Page opens her door. But even then it's got an odd veil over it, of social awkwardness or just some inexplicable lack of the full charm and friendliness that Coop exuded. So overall we get like 30 min or less of the real Cooper. I think that's part of the point, surely, the dissolving of boundaries between his different identities... But it's harder to appreciate fully when you remember this came about only after a dozen (!) episodes of Coop trapped in the body of a man with the mind of a 2 year-old kid.

All that said, I did think Part 18, that final hour, was the best one in Season 3 - partly because it's so interesting as a stand-alone thing, the trip to 431 miles or whatever it is and the subsequent switch to Coop and Diane having the most uncomfortable and disturbing sex scene in television history. And with Odessa, it became even more interesting - now that's how you add a new location into Twin Peaks. I'd take the "Odessa" part (probably shot in CA!) over the tired Vegas business with the same stock footage establishing shots (no really, Twitter detectives confirmed most or all of the big sky-scraping shots were borrowed from some Getty Images/whatever type company or photographer, tweaked in post a bit at least but still very recognizable.

I'll stop here, because I could go on forever about this... Season 3 is the most fascinating failure - I mean, a noble failure with plenty to love, but still I think fell flat on so many very basic levels of filmmaking.

That's a pity, because they're VERY difficult to find copies of otherwise--I watched them years ago for an article and it was a pain in the ass to get my hands on them. On the Air is both fascinating and pretty bad at the same time, but Hotel Room is legitimately interesting material. I found my old write-ups, which I've been meaning to put back online after the site I wrote them for lost them in a redesign, and thought I'd put them here:

Hotel Room
David Lynch collaborated with Monty Montgomery, the producer of <i>Wild at Heart</i>, in this attempt at creating an anthology series in which every episode took place in the same hotel room but with different characters and time periods. However, only the pilot episode of the series was ever shot, a feature-length portmanteau film that contains two shorts by Lynch and written by Barry Gifford (the author of the book <i>Wild at Heart</i> was adapted from and co-writer of <i>Lost Highway</i>) and one directed by <i>SNL</i>'s James Signorelli and written by Jay McInerney. Originally the show was to have one of segment by David Mamet, but Montgomery didn't like Mamet's contribution so Lynch/Gifford had two shorts rather than one.

Despite being on HBO, each of the stories is essentially a filmed play, to the point that they not only have a unity of time and space, they're also staged theatrically and are shot in obvious sets. As such, they're perhaps the least Lynchian-looking things that Lynch ever directed, with none of the unsettling camera angles or editing that make up the rest of his work. Instead, Lynch focused on performances and the dialogue, which fortunately came out very well due to his use of his usual stock company, including Harry Dean Stanton and Freddie Jones in the the first short "Tricks" and the fantastic Crispin Glover and Alicia Witt in "Blackout." McInerny's short is kind of the odd man out and, while not terrible, feels a bit out of place with its <i>Sex in the City</i>-style conflict surrounded by Lynch and Gifford's bleak misery.

"Tricks" oddly prefigures themes of mistaken identity that Lynch and Gifford would explore soon afterwards in <i>Lost Highway</8>, as two men soliciting a prostitute end up switching places by the end of the story. However, "Blackout" is a much more interesting short, taking place in 1936 during a city-wide blackout and focusing on a couple's co-dependent method of coping with their only child's death through psychosis. Oddest of all is the note of hopefulness that arrives at the end of the short, making it one of the few works Lynch has ever created that can be said to have a happy ending. Unfortunately, despite its pedigree <i>Hotel Room</i> has long been out of print (and when it was, in the states it was only on VHS), but is worth seeking out for more than just completionism.

On the Air
According to Lynch, he was inspired to create <i>On the Air</i> while mixing sound for an episode of <i>Twin Peaks</i>' second season, so it's no surprise that <i>On the Air</i> is itself about creating a television. He and Frost got to work on a pilot for the half-hour comedy quickly and banged out a script before the end of 1990, filming it March of the next year with healthy doses of the <i>Twin Peaks</i>' cast filling in for new roles. Oddly enough, despite, <i>Twin Peaks</i> and ABC having some large disagreements at this point and the show's future in jeopardy, ABC decided to pick up the pilot and ordered six more episodes of the show. By the time they were shot, though, ABC was thoroughly finished with Lynch/Frost and delayed the episodes until June 1992, only airing three of them in the middle of the summer and with essentially no publicity. Unsurprisingly, few watched the show and that first batch of episodes were the only ones made.

That being said, it's difficult to be too unhappy about this loss. The pilot episode, directed by Lynch and co-written by him and Frost, is almost too clever to be funny. Although there are gags, most of these are pretty childish slapstick affairs. It's the angry satire and the strangely avant-garde surrealism of the episode that made for a strangely compelling end product. As a stand-alone affair it's an excellent episode, far more successful than any of Lynch's other attempts at full-on comedy, but it was made to set up the show's future, which largely rides the same jokes and situations as the first episode, to vastly diminishing returns. By the end of the season, it feels like the show was put out of its misery, and even Lynch's return to co-writing the finale does little to help the ailing show. As gags from the first episode repeat again and again, it's clear that Lynch and Frost had a clever idea, but wanted that clever idea to return every episode. It's a bleak idea of what exactly a sit-com entails, and while the first episode is worth searching out online, the rest of the series is better left unwatched.

Last edited by albucat on Thu Oct 26, 2017 4:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I remember American Chronicles well—or rather, I remember missing all but one episode of it because it was difficult to figure out when it was airing. It was hard to keep up with the number of Lynch/Frost projects of the early 1990s, especially in the days before the web.

There was a brief period, coinciding with Twin Peak's first season, when networks were green-lighting whatever half-baked ideas Lynch and Frost proposed (probably as much to Lynch/Frost's surprise as anyone's). All of this helps to explain the tough-to-recall moment in the 1990s when Lynch was completely overexposed and taken for granted. For the most part Lost Highway was greeted, at best, politely.... It wasn't until Mulholland Dr.—whose reputation grew by leaps and bounds every year of the 2000s—that Lynch was really established in the cinematic firmament, so to speak.

I have a soft spot for the first episode of On the Air—it's outrageously unfunny in a strangely gratifying way that recalls Jerry Lewis—but one couldn't really accuse that series of quality control.

I think that if On the Air and other TV work like Hotel Room does get released, it'd undoubtedly be as an extra on perhaps this hypothetical, eventual "complete series" set (or the S3 set, if they had chosen to). That is, I cannot see any of those being given their own release; it'd barely sell and whoever put it out would have just wasted time and money. Since I doubt that Criterion would include them on a Lost Highway release, it seems their only hope may be on whatever final set TP gets (assuming there isn't a S4).

Actually now that I think about it, I wonder if putting these on a Criterion Lost Highway is so far-fetched after all. I mean, On the Air and Hotel Room are both sort of transitional works made between FWWM and LH. (Well, I'm not certain when On the Air was made, but it aired June 1992, so considering FWWM debuted at Cannes that May, and was shot the previous Sept/Oct, I'd be surprised if the show was done before that point). Even the DP on LH, Peter Deming, apparently shot all of Hotel Room and one episode of On the Air, too. Tonally, OTA does differ wildly from LH, but Hotel Room seems more in line with it... I haven't actually seen either in full, just bits and pieces. OTA seems kind of like Lynch's sense of humor at its most irritatingly zany, but Hotel Room is very intriguing and I'm somewhat surprised it's so obscured. So an official HD release would be nice.

Both Hotel Room and Lost Highway was written by Barry Gifford, so that's another connection. Wouldn't love to see it come out. I've only seen it on a very poor VHS-copy, but the two Lynch-directed segments still made an impression.

On another note: that brief BTS clip at the top of the EW page linked upthread is pretty cool. Makes me want more of that kind of stuff in the extras - it's always fascinating watch Lynch direct, or put a scene together, and no less so here. I'd even be very interested to see him guide the actors and craft a scene, but one that I thought didn't work. I'm just curious what it all looked like on the production side of things because it's such an odd, unwieldy, flawed but great piece of work.

Not sure how many others picked up Frost's "Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier" novel, but the book is quite generous in detailing the fates of characters from the original series not addressed in Showtime's The Return/A Limited Event Series/Season 3 (I'm going to call it "Season 3"), as well as offering a couple fairly direct explanations, and subtle clues for how to interpret the more oblique moments in the series. "Dossier" is a quick, fun read, but if you're just interested in shedding some light on Season 3...

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The biggest reveal is the confirmation that Sarah Palmer did live in New Mexico during her childhood and early adolescence, and was found unresponsive in her bedroom one night in 1956, the same night a double murder occurred at a nearby radio station. She regained consciousness on the way to the hospital and the doctors could not find anything wrong with her.

Audrey Horne awoke from her coma three weeks after the bank explosion, eventually opening a beauty salon and marrying her accountant. She broke off all contact with her father, never allowing him to see her son Richard. A few years prior to the events shown in Season 3, Audrey's mental health deteriorated to the point where she closed her business and was believed to have been institutionalized in a private care facility.

The most telling aspect of "Dossier" is two-fold: one, it confirms that those who enter the various portals can travel forward or backward in time as well as space (note that "The Dutchman's Lodge" is an actual roadside motel popular in the 30s/40s but demolished in 1967), and, two, the alternate timeline Cooper creates by saving Laura Palmer's life affects how we view all of Season 3. The novel strongly suggests that all of Sarah Palmer scenes (as an adult) take place in the alternate timeline in which Laura's life has been spared. Additionally, a brief aside reveals that, after Cooper passed through the doorway in the boiler room of the Great Northern, Gordon Cole found himself in the company of both Horne brothers, meaning that Jerry never went on his long, disturbing hike in the alternate timeline. The unique aspect of this parallel dimension trope that Frost highlights (as did Lynch on the show) is that the characters can still faintly recall the "original" timeline (or the "unofficial version" as Phillip Jeffries tells Cooper) as if it were a dream.

I think this explains a lot of the weird inconsistencies in Season 3; what we're seeing are multiple timelines inter-cut. Bobby's strange remark regarding finding something that afternoon that his father left a day or two after we saw him find it, as well as the shifting Double R customers and the inconsistent reflections, all suggest a melding of different timelines. The Roadhouse patron who can't remember if her uncle was present while she recounts the story about Billy could be describing an event that was altered by Cooper's actions. Furthermore, I now suspect that some of the characters are actually aware of the changing timeline: Jerry Horne senses he is being torn between two places which results in him screaming that he doesn't know where he is. Sarah Palmer (who already could sense things as a member of "the gifted and the damned") probably knows she exists in a timeline different from the one she occupied before; the panic she displays when seeing the newly-shelved Turkey Jerky at the grocery store could indicate that she's fearful another timeline shift could be happening. This also goes a long way in explaining the Audrey segments; we're watching her timeline change before our eyes.

With this new information in hand, i'm looking forward to watching Season 3 again when the Blu-ray is released.

The digital cinematography looks lovely on the Blu-Ray. The folks who hated the Red Room images should take another look: it looks absolutely sumptous.

PS.: I don't understand the almost personal criticism of Lynch in some quarters (no one here, mind) for S3. Season Two runs for 21 episodes and by my count, has 10 absolute stinkers, a decent Episode 27 elevated by Gyllenhaal's direction and the good to very good early run plus the two all time greats 14 & 29 (and dare I say it, Season 1 feels semi-pedestrian at times too). Season 3 has, to me, four underwhelming episodes (9, 12, 4, 17) (and I only really hated the Freddie-Bob confrontation in Pt 17) and a bunch of details or scenes that don't sit right with me, but that is still 11 good to very good episodes plus the excellent Pts 3, 11, 18 and my current all-time best hour of Twin Peaks, Part 8. That one hour towers for me even above Episode 14 and the Pilot.

I agree, Finch. About the only argument against this season worth really entertaining is that it’s maybe not as tight as FWWM.

I think Part 3’s opening sequence is going to be such a huge influence down the road. The way Lynch uses streaming buffering and rewinding to create unease in the Mauve Zone is terrifically inventive, and yet one of those things that feels perfectly obvious in hindsight.

I'm not sure if this is true (Source is Twitter) but apparently the demand for the latest Blu-Ray release has been so high CBS has had to go out and print more everything. If you plan on getting this on a home disc format it might be prudent to order now.

It's sold out on Amazon and B&N (was hoping to use some gift cards/coupons there but I'll have to wait, I guess) and it seems like some people didn't even get their preorders shipped out. I wish this release were better handled especially right before the holidays but I'm glad to hear they're printing more and that there's so much demand, at least.